


The Path of the Righteous Man...

by Eligh



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Coda, I mean seriously wtf, M/M, Where the hell was Hawkeye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-18 23:23:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1446691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eligh/pseuds/Eligh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil's not dealing well with the events of the last few weeks. And when May points out that a certain sharp-eyed Specialist has disappeared off the map, he doesn't want to think about what that might mean. Goal number one: find Hawkeye. Goal number two: figure out the rest of your goals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Path of the Righteous Man...

**Author's Note:**

> **seriously, this is saved on my drive as 'spoiler, eli, dont be a dick'***
> 
>  
> 
> Also, I'm functioning under the assumption that if Cap's level eight clearance, so are Natasha and Clint. Melinda's level seven, right? Sure. Whatever, it doesn't really matter too much.

“Clint Barton.”

Phil looks up from the papers spread out over his desk. He’s more exhausted than he can ever remember being, hasn’t left his office in at least 48 hours, and hasn’t showered in at least 72.

They’re in the air over Northern Africa, mostly for lack of anywhere specific to be. SHIELD’s certainly not issuing any orders, and in fact they haven’t had contact with any SHIELD affiliates in over a week, other than a two-line heavily encrypted mass email from, apparently, Natasha. Previously friendly bases have proved less than willing to open their doors, and the United States government has likewise been remarkably unhelpful. Perhaps most disturbingly—especially after she specifically requested they keep in contact—he can’t get ahold of Victoria Hand or Ward.

To be entirely honest, Phil’s starting to feel a little persecuted, and now May comes to him with this… this non sequitur.

He blinks. His eyes feel fuzzy. “What about him?”

May tilts her head and takes a breath. Things between them are still quite tense; yet another source of exhaustion. “Before she went off-grid,” she says gingerly, settling into parade rest and fixing her eyes on the wall behind Phil’s left shoulder, “Agent Hand said that Captain America and the Black Widow were working together in DC. Where was Hawkeye?”

Phil blinks. He hadn’t thought of that. Why _wasn’t_ Clint with Natasha? They very rarely separated, especially during high-risk missions. Their codependency is legendary. There’s no reason for—

A traitorous, sickening thought occurs.

Clint wouldn’t, he _couldn’t_.

“He’s not HYDRA,” Phil murmurs, mostly to reassure himself. It works at least a little, because putting voice to it helps cement the thought.  He takes a deep breath. “He can’t be, Clint isn’t… he _isn’t_. He fought in New York.”

“He almost single-handedly took down a Helicarrier,” May points out, though she doesn’t look particularly pleased to be saying it. “And a history of service isn’t necessarily—”

“Don’t finish that thought,” Phil warns, sharp. May shuts her mouth and Phil sighs, shakes his head. “Sorry. But no, the issue with the tesseract… he was under others’ control. That was not him.”

May hesitates for a moment, but then straightens her shoulders. The names _Sitwell_ and _Garrett_ are circling the air around them, unvoiced, but all May says is,“We should look for him. It would give us a concrete goal, sir.” She looks down and quieter, adds, “And I’m worried about him. He’s my friend.”

Clint’s Phil’s friend, too, but he doesn’t like this. Nothing is certain anymore, and honestly? He’s not sure if finding out that Clint’s dead—or worse, a traitor—would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Still, it _is_ a good idea, and they need a heading. “Get Skye working on finding him. I’ll be down shortly.”

~

Skye finds him, because that is what she is good at, and so of course she does.

Clint Barton, however, is apparently holed up outside of Wakanda for some godforsaken reason—Phil wasn’t even aware that the Wakandans were _talking_ to anyone outside their borders, let alone _Clint_. It’s confusing.

Clint has also, apparently, killed the entirety of the possibly-HYRDA-affiliated battalion sent to assassinate him, because of course _he_ did. It is also possible that _Clint_ is the HYDRA-affiliate, and the team he killed was loyal SHIELD.

Information’s pretty spotty all around. 

May turns the Bus away from Egyptian airspace and Phil mentally prepares himself for another shitstorm.

~

The shitstorm hits, and so sixteen hours after May brought this issue to Phil’s attention (none of which, may he add, did he spend sleeping) Phil’s standing in the ruins of a SHIELD outpost, surrounded by bodies whose blood’s been made tacky in the cloying heat. His hands are raised over his head and he’s got a shockingly large handgun inches from his face (not SHIELD issue, because Clint does so like going off-book) and Clint Barton is giving him crazy eyes.

“What the actual fuck, who the fuck are you?” Clint asks, a little shrill and very loud. Unnecessarily loud, actually, and Phil feels a surge of alarm when he realizes that Clint’s got dried blood down the left side of his face. It looks like his ear has been bleeding.

“It’s _me_ , Clint,” Phil stresses, forming his words carefully. “It’s me and I’m not HYDRA, I’m not here to hurt you. I came looking for you because we need help right now and you are the best.”

Clint’s hand doesn’t waver, but his eyes are wide. “Phillip Coulson died with an alien spear through his heart.”

Phil can see May creeping along the wall behind Clint, and not good, not good. He tries to send her a signal to stand down without Clint noticing, but there’s very little he can do that Hawkeye will miss, visually, so he just settles for looking worried and honest and taking one step closer. Clint’s grip on his gun tightens.

“I can explain that,” Phil says, because as little as he wants to think about the spear and the aftermath, and everything that entails, this is Clint.

“Yea, not so much interested in your delay tactics right now,” Clint says archly, though he gestures with the gun before remembering himself and bringing it back to bear. Phil reevaluates Clint’s wide-legged stance and the blood on his face; he’s clearly got a concussion and is fighting not to show it.

“The Brazilian forest,” Phil says, louder than he’d like but he wants to make sure Clint can hear him. “The Mongolian Steppes, Johannesburg, _Venice_. Budapest, Clint. It’s me. Please put the gun down.”

Clint sucks in a breath. “You could be an LMD. Or fuck, HYDRA. Probably HYDRA is more concerning at the moment, though you being an LMD would also suck, like, donkey balls or something.” He blinks and refocuses. “And so just why the fuck should I believe you?”

There is very little Phil can say that would make Clint believe him right now. Any potential hostiles have already been neutralized, and then here they come in their battered Bus, which easily could have been stolen. They could be on the run. They could be anything, and Clint won’t know.

“Because SHIELD made me lie to you by omission,” Phil settles on telling him, because yes, this has been in the back of his mind since long before he even got his team, nevermind the drama of the last few months, the last few days. “Because they wouldn’t let me tell you I was alive, but now that SHIELD’s not really a thing anymore, they don’t have that sort of hold over me.” He takes another step closer. “Because clearance levels don’t really matter when SHIELD’s secrets are trending on Twitter.” He reaches out and touches Clint’s forearm; it wavers slightly and Clint’s eyes widen even further. “And because I missed you like I can’t say.”

There’s a beat of silence.

“I heard Tasha and Cap saved the world and didn’t even call me,” Clint mutters, sounding perfectly petulant.

“To be fair,” Phil argues, the tight feeling of panic beginning to ease, “you appear to have had your plate full.” He glances around at the surrounding carnage and amends, “Very full.” With that, he drops his hands. Clint slowly lowers the gun, and then winces and staggers a little. Phil takes a last step and reaches up, steadying him with one hand while he pushes his fingers of the other against the blood flaking down Clint’s cheeks. “What happened to you?”

“One of the fuckers stabbed me in the ear,” Clint says, and then laughs humorlessly. “It’s a good thing I know how to read lips, sir.”

Phil shakes his head, sudden sick helplessness thick in his throat. Clint’s injuries have always been on the extreme ends. The man can’t catch a break. “Can you hear at all?”

“Not out of my left ear, I can’t. Well. There’s a sorta high-pitched whine?” Clint says, and then spins, pointing his gun unerringly at May. “I saw you earlier, Melinda,” he informs her as she deflates. “You’ve really gotta step up the stalking.”

Phil touches him on the shoulder, and when Clint looks at him again, orders, “On the bus, Specialist. Let’s get your head looked at.”

~

“Well,” Clint says, letting himself into Phil’s office on the Bus and shutting the door silently behind him, “the ringing’s stopped, and your doc says that she can’t see any permanent damage.” He gestures to his ear and the bandage Jemma’s taped over it. “It itches.”

“She’s not actually a medical doctor,” Phil points out. “I’d like to get you to a hospital.”

Clint shakes his head. “No, I.” He stops himself and then sighs, leaning against Phil’s desk. “What the hell is going on, Phil?”

“I don’t know,” Phil tells him. “Everything’s very… I don’t know who to trust.” He thinks about May, and Ward’s lack of judgment with the Clairvoyant. “I’m not even sure about my team.”

Clint makes a soft tsking noise. “What about, uh. Tasha and Cap and Tony. Banner, I guess. Thor? And where the fuck is Nick?”

Phil leans back in his chair and rubs his hands over his eyes. “Natasha and Captain Rogers are apparently working with Maria in DC, but I’m not sure what they’re doing. Stark is recovering from heart surgery, Banner is in the wind, and Thor is probably on Asgard.” He hesitates. “Nick’s… Clint, Nick’s—”

Clint’s face closes off and he tenses. “Don’t you fucking say it.”

Unfortunately, not saying it won’t make it any less true. “He didn’t make it,” Phil says softly. “I heard it from Hand, and I don’t think she’d lie. Not about that, anyway.”

“Jesus.” Clint’s gone utterly still, frozen, and it hurts to see him so shaken. As angry as Phil had been at Nick, he was still Phil’s friend, and he knows full well that he was Clint’s friend, too, more so than people think. Thought.

“Clint—”

“What about Blake?” Clint interrupts. “Garrett? Jasper? Are they okay? Where are the rest of the level eights and nines?”

God, he _had_ been off the grid. Phil closes his eyes. “Blake’s in critical condition after a run-in with a, a weapon.” He doesn’t want to get into the details right now. “Sitwell and Garrett were.” Clint’s staring at him. He sighs. “They were HYDRA, Clint. Hand and I apprehended Garrett, and last I heard, she and one of my team were transporting him to cold storage. As for Sitwell,  Black Widow and Captain America handled him.”

Clint looks like he’s been punched. His mouth’s fallen open and he’s clinging tight to the edge of Phil’s desk. “Sir,” he starts to say, but then shakes his head. “Jaz, I, he couldn’t be, I—”

“I know,” Phil says, and when Clint staggers backward and sits heavily in Phil’s visitor chair, Phil doesn’t blame him in the least.

~

Phil only wakes when his bed dips, and he figures he can blame that on prolonged sleeplessness and trauma. He tenses, but a quiet ‘ _sir_ ’ drains the fight out of him and he reaches out in the dark, his fingers bumping against Clint’s soft t-shirt.

He pulls Clint closer, flops awkwardly over so they can both stretch out in Phil’s narrow bed. Clint’s shaking a little and so Phil wraps his arms around him, tosses the blanket across his back so they can share heat.

It’s not sexual. At least, Phil doesn’t think it is; Clint has issues out the ass about relationships and Phil’s not exactly faultless himself. They’ve never so much as brushed lips, not in the fifteen years they’ve known each other, though Phil’s watched Clint take more people to bed than he can count, man and woman.

Sometimes, though, after missions gone south and with new death fresh on their ledgers, they’ll crawl in together like this and hold on. It’s comforting, it’s familiar, and Phil missed this so goddamn much.

“We’ll be okay,” he whispers into the darkness, angling to talk into Clint’s uninjured ear. There’s rough stubble under his lips and Clint’s calloused hands on his back. He closes his eyes against the gloom.

“I have no idea if you’re lying to me,” Clint says suddenly, quietly. “You could be a traitor and made all that shit up and I’ve got no way to check it. And you shouldn’t trust me, I don’t have any way to prove I’m loyal. This is a real clusterfuck we’ve got on our hands, sir.”

“It is,” Phil agrees.

Clint shuffles closer and nudges his nose into the hollow under Phil’s jaw. And, ah. Well. That’s new.

“You know the worst thing?” Clint mutters. His voice rumbles against Phil’s chest, his neck, and Phil’s eyes flutter. Not sexual. Not, not. This is Clint being scared and overly touchy. He does that.

Phil clears his throat. “Ah. What?”

“All that shit you told me,” Clint says. “Nick and Jaz and Garrett and this whole fucking thing, us losing everything, and the only thing I can think is that I’m just so goddamn happy you’re alive.” He takes a wavering, hitching breath. “I’m a terrible person.”

Phil huffs softly, fond. “Well. I’m happy I’m alive, too. If just so I can help where we need it. And we’ll need it, I think. We’ll need everything we can muster.”

“That’s not it,” Clint tells him, and there’s genuine amusement in his voice. Phil cocks his head, confused, and Clint’s hands tighten around his back. “Well, I mean, that’s _a_ reason, sure, but, sir I, well…”

Clint shifts then, and suddenly there’re warm lips pressing against his cheek. Phil turns his head and catches the kiss before he can think about it, before Clint can move away, and Clint’s breath hitches again. This time it’s a surprised, pleased hitch. Phil opens his mouth a little, because all he’s thinking is that he might like to get that reaction again.

The barest touch of Clint’s tongue jolts him back to reality, however, and Phil ducks away. “Wait.” He reaches up and clicks on the overhead light, illuminating his bunk. “What are you doing?”

Clint raises his eyebrows. “Kissing you?”

Smartass. “You don’t kiss me, Clint. We’re not involved, we’ve never been involved. Not like this.”

Clint stares at him for long enough that Phil’s almost sure he’s about to roll off the bunk and leave, but then Clint presses forward another inch or so, plastering them together. He shifts his weight, too, just enough that Phil can feel gentle pressure on his chest, pinning him down.

“You’ve never been back from the dead before, and our jobs have never been compromised by HYDRA before,” Clint informs him. “Shit’s changed.”

Phil absorbs this. “…And so you want to kiss me.”

“I’ve wanted to kiss you for a long time,” Clint confesses, though he doesn’t appear embarrassed about this or anything less than completely sure of himself. “Never seemed the time to act on it.” He rolls his hips, then, just a light movement, but Phil can feel something firm pressing against his leg. His eyebrows climb.

“And now’s the time.”

“Yessir,” Clint murmurs. “Far as I can see, SHIELD’s done, sir. So, one, I’m not sure if you’re my boss anymore. Two, it is entirely plausible that I’m going to be charged for _something_ when people find out what I did at that base--or on any other number of missions--and three, it’s also plausible that _you’ll_ be charged with something. The public’s finicky, and SHIELD’s never been exactly morally, ah, righteous. _Someone’s_ gonna answer for our sins. Way I figure it is that if I don’t kiss you now, there’s no telling if I’ll get another chance.”

There is a certain persuasion to his arguments. 

“Take off your pants,” Phil orders.

Clint does, and grins when he pulls his zipper down.

~

When Phil blinks awake in the morning, Clint’s gone. There’s come dried in a flaky crust on his sheets, though, and his cabin smells like Clint and sex, so Phil’s fairly certain he didn’t imagine things. So he pulls on a pair of slacks, (wrinkled) and shrugs into a shirt (less wrinkled) and staggers out into the land of the living.

Skye, Jemma, Leo, and Trip are all eating silently in the central cabin; Phil nods to them and glances around.

“He’s talking to May,” Skye says shortly. “I don’t know, should we trust him, AC? He may be Hawkeye, but he was acting really weird this morning. I mean, stuff’s not exactly great right now, but he was, like, floating or something.”

“Almost like something life-altering happened last night,” Trip comments, and then takes a large bite of cereal. He shoots Phil a knowing look and Phil fights down a blush. Damn specialists and their spy training.

“We’ll talk later,” Phil mumbles, and escapes up to the cockpit. Not that this turns out to be any better, as he interrupts Clint and May in the middle of a glaring contest.

He looks back and forth between them. “Issues, Agents?”

“No,” they say in unison. Phil raises an eyebrow.

“We’re not exactly a trusting bunch right now,” Clint mutters finally. May snorts in agreement.

Phil sighs and leans back against the cockpit door. “No, we're really not, are we. We don’t have much reason to trust each other." He gestures between the three of them. "Melinda betrayed me, for reasons that are still murky to me. Clint’s been MIA for the last several weeks, we have nothing but your word as a SHIELD agent that says you’re on the side of the angels, and SHIELD’s word doesn’t mean much right now. And I’ve been keeping secrets. I know my behavior’s been erratic.”

He pauses. “However, there are probably fewer than fifty people left in our organization with our levels of security clearance, so we are effectively running the show from now on. We are damage control. And right now, we need to be the face of SHIELD.”

Both May and Clint give him a once over. Phil is suddenly acutely aware that he is unshaven and over-tired, that he feels betrayed by one of the people he trusted most in the world—despite her (possible) good intentions—that he’s lost more friends and colleagues in this past week than he has in the entire history of his life—which is saying quite a lot—and in the last eight hours he has started a sexual relationship with someone whom he is not entirely sure is playing toward the same goals. He’s got a scar on his heart and alien blood in his veins, and no clear picture of what to do next.

But he’s Phil Coulson. He’s a force of goddamn nature, and he’s going to be damned if he gives up.

“I need to shave, and shower. Melinda—” she blinks in surprise at his use of her first name “—get us to DC. We need to talk to Maria Hill. Clint, I want you to gather up Captain Rogers and Ms. Romanov and head to Avengers Tower. Stark’s been languishing long enough, and if anyone knows where Banner is, he will. I’m going to contact Doctor Foster, see if she can get in touch with Thor. We might not be SHIELD anymore, but we’re still us. We’ll still fight. And the world won’t stop throwing shit at us because we’re disorganized. We need to pull ourselves together.”

“Yessir,” Clint and May say. Phil takes a breath. It’s going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> SITWELL **sob** I can't even tell you, fucking Sitwell, noooooooo how could you, you made us LIKE YOU AND WE TRUSTED YOU  
> seriously, it was like a punch to the gut when that reveal came. 
> 
> *cough* 
> 
> AND WARD WTF. though I'm holding out hope that he's a triple agent, please plz plz. EMOTIONS, guys. 
> 
> ANYWAY, I have a recommendation: Watch AoS 1x16, then immediately go see the Winter Soldier, then immediately watch AoS 1x17. That is what I did and it was LIKE A FOUR HOUR MOVIE OF AWESOMENESS. 
> 
> do it I know you want to.


End file.
